Acadia Goes Aground

This stretch of seaweed-strewn beach is near where the blockade runner Acadia went aground in February 1865, in a pea-soup fog. That was a bad time for runners off the Texas coast, with the loss of two big steamers and the near-loss of a third.

The runner Acadia ended her brief life on the Gulf beach about forty miles south of Galveston. Acadia had been launched at Sorel (now Sorel-Tracy), Quebec, on the St. Lawrence River in May 1864. She was a large side-wheel steamer, 211 feet long and registered at 738 tons. There was little infrastructure for the construction of iron-hulled vessels in Canada at the time, so Acadia was built of timber. Acadia was registered at Montreal on the last day of October 1864 by Jacques Felix Lincennes of Sorel and William McNaughton of Montreal, but her true ownership remains unclear. Acadia’s owners evidently intended to run her through the blockade or otherwise dispose of the ship to make a quick profit because they took the step of noting on her registry papers that her master, Thomas Leach, was empowered to sell the ship with “no minimum price named, at any place out of the province of Canada.”Acadia sailed from Halifax for Nassau on December 6, 1864. Among her passengers was a group of men who the local U.S. consul reported were part of a “piratical gang” of Confederates traveling to Vera Cruz, Mexico, from there to go overland to California with the intent of seizing a U.S. Mail steamer on the Pacific coast. Acadia made a brief stop at Nassau, where she took on cargo for Texas, and then another at Havana, loading more inbound cargo. After a stop at Vera Cruz to land the Confederates bound for California, Acadia sailed again, this time setting a northerly course for the Texas coast.Acadia ran hard aground in the surf between San Luis Pass and the mouth of the Brazos River around dusk on February 5, 1865, in the same heavy fog conditions that led to the loss of Will o’ the Wisp. Captain Leach—who by some accounts was trying to enter the mouth of the Brazos River at Velasco (an ill-conceived plan if true, given the large size of the steamer) — later claimed that he had intended to reach the coast much farther north, about fifteen miles south of Galveston, but had been pushed off course by a strong current. In fact, Acadia’s failed attempt to run the blockade seems in retrospect to have been almost doomed by incompetence. The ship’s sailing master, frustrated at his inability to get his bearings in the fog, had reportedly given up charge of piloting the vessel before the ship struck bottom, and the steamer’s magnetic compass had allegedly never been properly secured or adjusted, “no regard being had for quantity of iron and iron nails closely connected with the needle, in fact, not a binnacle in the ship, the compasses not even fixed on deck when leaving Havana.” The destruction of the ship was made complete the following morning, when she was discovered and shelled by the blockader USS Virginia.